4 Reasons to Avoid Personal Internet Time at Work

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4 Reasons to Avoid Personal Internet Time at Work

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Having too much freedom at work for personal internet use can be traumatic to your network and company. If you have employees with unmonitored access to email and internet, there are a number of things they can do that can harm your business. Here are four reasons to avoid personal internet time at work:

1. Bandwidth Costs. Heavy graphics, video clips, and audio files are particularly notorious for clogging digital pipelines. If your staff is emailing photos of their family vacation to their friends, paying bills online, or downloading music, they are using up a large amount of expensive bandwidth and slowing down your organization as a result.

2. A Damaged Reputation. A lawyer at a London law firm forwarded an explicit email he received from a female acquaintance to several coworkers as a joke. Unfortunately, they had sent it to a few of their friends, and within a short period of time, thousands of people around the world, including the press, received it. Because of this email, they ended up in a huge controversy that hurt their image and credibility.

3. Loss of Productivity. Email and the internet offer a temptation that is hard to resist. It is why 73% of employees who use the internet are fully aware that they are consuming valuable bandwidth and hampering critical business activities with inappropriate internet usage–but do it anyway.

4. Viruses and Spyware. Employees can accidentally download harmful viruses and spyware through music files, screensavers, and other online files.